This award supports the development of a theory of coordination by means of examining the interactions of various organizational styles with the environmental characteristics of different problem domains. Organizational styles can be operationalized as sets of coordination mechanisms that enforce certain behaviors as part of the style. However, not all coordination behavior arises from abstract organizational styles; much arises from standard responses to specific environmental (problem domain) characteristics. This research aims to extend environment and organization models, represent standard responses to common environmental problems, and develop operational specifications for organizational styles. This allows the interactions between environmental constraints and organizational styles to be reasoned about analytically. Designers are not doomed to create coordinated systems with only a few simple organizational behaviors and large numbers of brittle domain-specific coordination heuristics. Instead, given good environment models and certain other constraints (often dictated by existing human organizations), desiginers can make principled choices of computational organizations and standard environment-influenced coordination behaviors. This project will result in a much richer set of tools for building and analyzing both multi-agent computer systems and integrating such systems with existing human organizations in applications such as distributed information gathering, distributed scheduling, and concurrent engineering. www.cis.udel.edu/~decker/research/organizations.html
